“Tommy,” my childhood playmate, thought he was Superman.
He wore a cape, fought imaginary bad guys, and insisted on being called Superman. His mom and dad played along—until the day “Superman” decided he could fly and jumped off the garage roof. Fortunately, he only broke his arm, not his neck, and his parents went back to calling him Tommy.
Tommy was limited, you might say, by a very concrete, physical reality: he was a boy, not Superman. No matter how hard he imagined, how strongly he believed, and how soaring his lift-off, he would plummet straight down to the ground. He could not fly.
Initially, his parents indulged his childish, wishful thinking. But Tommy’s painful collision with reality jarred them back into their authoritative role as parents. Tommy needed their guidance. He needed them to explain the truth inscribed in his body: the ‘real Tommy’ wasn’t Superman—he was a boy. And God made him for something far better than being “Superman.” His happiness, not to mention his safety, depended on accepting and embracing that reality.
Fast forward to Massachusetts, 2013.
Just as Tommy needed his parents to ground him in reality, the children of Massachusetts need the adults in their lives to do the same.
But the Massachusetts Board of Education has done the opposite. It recently established a harmful protocol for Massachusetts’ public schools, under the benign title, “Creating a Safe and Supportive School Environment.” The document offers “guidance” for elementary and secondary schools as they implement new state laws prohibiting gender identity discrimination.
Specifically, schools must remove all “obstacles” which prevent ‘transgender or gender non-conforming students’ from enjoying “equal educational opportunities.” (Massachusetts law defines a ‘transgender’ student as one “whose gender identity or gender expression is different from that traditionally associated with the assigned sex at birth.”)
Much of the outcry centers on three points:
- Transgender children must be allowed to use restrooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex, if they so choose.
- Transgender children may use any name or pronoun, regardless of its biological mismatch (e.g., a boy who identifies as a transgendered girl may insist on being called “she”).
- Schools must “eliminate” gendered dress codes and classroom management strategies that divide children by gender.
The Board’s policy manufactures ‘solutions’ to an imaginary problem. It cites the “reality” that children with gender identity issues are enrolled in Massachusetts’ schools, but offers no evidence that any of them actually have been excluded from “educational opportunities,” such as chemistry, math, or English classes, because of their gender identity.
But facts don’t matter to the Massachusetts propagandists. Their real goal has little to do with educational access and everything to do with indoctrinating teachers and children in radical gender theory.
The Massachusetts policy systematically foists a perverse orthodoxy on every public school teacher and child. It promotes the core belief—the big lie—that there is no such thing as human nature or natural distinctions of male and female. Instead, the Board of Education embraces the queer gospel that each person is a god unto him or herself, creating a gender identity based on feelings, or one’s “internalized sense” of self, regardless of biology.
“Male and female He created them?” Not in Massachusetts.
The Board of Education insists that schools proactively “create a culture” that would make gender-nonconforming and transgender kids “feel safe, supported, and fully included.” But the new transgender-safe culture is insidious. It must be created even if the school currently has no transgender or gender-nonconforming children. Why? Liberals presume that unknown numbers of transgender children are suffering alone and in secret, and that they will only ‘come out’ if the coast is clear.
So everyone must play the transgender game. The indoctrination (“education and training”) will be part of every school’s “anti-bullying curriculum, student leadership trainings, and staff professional development.”
Worse, the Massachusetts Board of Education clearly expects all students and teachers to go along with the big lie:
- Students who object to the intrusion on their privacy (from an opposite sex, ‘transgender’ child in restrooms or changing facilities) will be told, effectively, ‘Too bad. Get over it.’
- Students who refuse to go along with the fiction and refer to the transgender child by his or her gender “assigned at birth” instead of the preferred pronoun, will subject to “discipline.” Teachers must “model” the required speech and attitude.
- Schools will train students and teachers in Orwellian doublespeak: gender is “assigned” at birth (as if ‘male’ and ‘female’ were arbitrary classifications, as random as being assigned to the blue team or red team in gym class) and transgender students may elect “gender-confirming surgeries” (as if double mastectomies, genital removal, and other gender-mutilating surgeries ‘confirmed’ anything).
- Children will bear the new burden of discovering their gender identity, but will be taught that their bodies offer nary a clue. They will be taught that the transgender identity, perceived as young as “age four,” is “innate” and “largely inflexible.” (The Board ignores decades of research to the contrary. Dr. Kenneth Zucker, head of the Gender Identity Service at Toronto’s Center for Addiction and Mental Health contends that, “The majority of children followed longitudinally appear to lose the diagnosis of GID [gender identity disorder] [by] late adolescence or young adulthood, and appear to have …a gender identity that matches their natal sex.”)
In Massachusetts, a transgender-supportive culture means that school officials will insist that normal children squelch instinctive reactions that something is wrong when a dress-wearing boy calls himself a girl. Children will be taught that religious truths about sexuality are bigoted relics of a less-enlightened time. They will learn that their bodily reality is nothing more than an arbitrary “assignment” at birth—there is no “human nature,” only personal choices and self-definition along a shifting spectrum of human sexuality. Finally, they will be taught not to judge: Who is to say that one’s chosen gender identity is any less normal, natural, or good than another?
Remember my friend Tommy? He needed the truth. He needed to embrace his bodily reality instead of wishing for something different.
The children of Massachusetts need the same. The ‘Big Lie’ can never substitute for the truth.